In this article, we address the problem of an image-based automatic classification of waste materials. Given the large number of waste categories and the importance of proper management of waste materials, the problem is known to be critical and of a particular interest. To achieve reliable waste classification capability, we propose a novel approach, that we name double fusion, which optimally combines multiple deep learning models using feature and score-level fusion methods. The double fusion scheme ensures an optimized contribution of the deep models by, firstly, combining their capabilities in an early and late fusion scheme followed by a score-level fusion of the classification results obtained with early and late fusion methods. In total, we employ and compare six different fusion methods including two feature-level fusion schemes, namely (i) Discriminant Correlation Analysis and (ii) simple concatenation of deep features, and four late fusion methods, namely (i) Particle Swarm Optimization, (ii) Genetic modeling of deep features (iii) Induced Ordered Weighted Averaging and (iv) a baseline method where all the deep models are treated equally. Moreover, we also evaluate the performance of the individual deep models, and compare our results against state-of-the-art methods demonstrating a significant improvement of 3.58% over state-of-the-art.

Hyperspectral image classification (HSIC) has become a hot research topic. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) has been widely used in a wide range of real-world application areas due to the in-depth spectral information stored within each pixel. Noticeably, the detailed features, i.e., a nonlinear correlation between the obtained spectral data and the correlating HSI data object, generate efficient classification results that are complex for traditional techniques. Deep learning (DL) has recently been validated as an influential feature extractor that efficiently identifies the nonlinear issues that have arisen in various computer vision challenges. This motivates using DL for HSIC, which shows promising results. This survey provides a brief description of DL for HSIC and compares cutting-edge methodologies in the field. We will first summarize the key challenges for HSIC, and then, we will discuss the superiority of DL and DL ensemble in addressing these issues. In this article, we divide state-of-the-art DL methodologies and DL with ensemble into spectral features, spatial features, and combined spatial–spectral features in order to comprehensively and critically evaluate the progress (future research directions as well) of such methodologies for HSIC. Furthermore, we will take into account that DL involves a substantial percentage of labeled training images, whereas obtaining such a number for HSI is time and cost consuming. As a result, this survey describes some methodologies for improving the classification performance of DL techniques, which can serve as future recommendations.

Plant disease automation in agriculture science is the primary concern for every country, as the food demand is increasing at a fast rate due to an increase in population. Moreover, the increased use of technology today has increased the efficacy and accuracy of detecting diseases in plants and animals. The detection process marks the beginning of a series of activities to fight the diseases and reduce their spread. Some diseases are also transmitted between animals and human beings, making it hard to fight them. For many years, scientists have researched how to deal with the common diseases that affect humans and plants. However, there are still many parts of the detection and discovery process that have not been completed. The technology used in medical procedures has not been adequate to detect all diseases on time, and that is why some diseases turn out to become pandemics because they are hard to detect on time. Our focus is to clarify the details about the diseases and how to detect them promptly with artificial intelligence. We discuss the use of machine learning and deep learning to detect diseases in plants automatically. Our study also focuses on how machine learning methods have been moved from conventional machine learning to deep learning in the last five years. Furthermore, different data sets related to plant diseases are discussed in detail. The challenges and problems associated with the existing systems are also presented.

Pernicious insects and plant diseases threaten the food science and agriculture sector. Therefore, diagnosis and detection of such diseases are essential. Plant disease detection and classification is a much‐developed research area due to enormous development in machine learning (ML). Over the last ten years, computer vision researchers proposed different algorithms for plant disease identification using ML. This paper proposes an end‐to‐end semantic leaf segmentation model for plant disease identification. Our model uses a deep convolutional neural network based on semantic segmentation (SS). The proposed algorithm highlights diseased and healthy parts and allows the classification of ten different diseases affecting a specific plant leaf. The model successfully highlights the foreground (leaf) and background (nonleaf) regions through SS, identifying regions as healthy and diseased parts. As the semantic label is provided by the proposed method for each pixel, the information about how much area of a specific leaf is affected due to a disease is also estimated. We use tomato plant leaves as a test case in our work. We test the proposed CNN‐based model on the publicly available database, PlantVillage. Along with PlantVillage, we also collected a dataset of twenty thousand images and tested our framework on it. Our proposed model obtained an average accuracy of 97.6%, which shows substantial improvement in performance on the same dataset compared to previous results.

Automatic gender classification is challenging due to large variations of face images, particularly in the un-constrained scenarios. In this paper, we propose a framework which first segments a face image into face parts, and then performs automatic gender classification. We trained a Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) based segmentation model through manually labeled face images. The CRFs based model is used to segment a face image into six different classes—mouth, hair, eyes, nose, skin, and back. The probabilistic classification strategy (PCS) is used, and probability maps are created for all six classes. We use the probability maps as gender descriptors and trained a Random Decision Forest (RDF) classifier, which classifies the face images as either male or female. The performance of the proposed framework is assessed on four publicly available datasets, namely Adience, LFW, FERET, and FEI, with results outperforming state-of-the-art (SOA).